Theft By Chocolate

           A woman looking for chocolate, love, and an international art thief in all the wrong places.

Theft By Chocolate is a cheeky museum-heist mystery—and a love letter to the intriguing world of museums.

For more than twenty years, Luba worked behind the scenes of the museum world, including at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum and Cultural Innovations, a private museum consulting firm with offices in Toronto and London, UK. So, naturally, she eventually wrote a novel about a museum heist. What else was she supposed to do?

Part Confessions of a Shopaholic, part thriller, and part backstage tour of museum life, Theft By Chocolate introduces readers to a deliciously quirky cast of museum employees, where eccentric personalities, questionable decisions, and priceless objects collide.

The story was inspired by Luba’s own museum experiences—and by a real-life, still-unsolved heist at the Royal Ontario Museum in the 1980s that sent shockwaves through the security industry worldwide.

Then came a chance encounter with a Toronto security-industry expert who shared previously little-known details about the puzzling theft. Intrigued, Luba rewrote the novel, weaving those revelations into her fictional story—and into a heist that would have consequences far beyond the museum walls.

The result is a taut, twisty page-turner that blends a notorious historical mystery with a very 21st-century heroine: a chocolate-addicted amateur sleuth. Because apparently, solving a museum heist wasn’t enough trouble.